Stepping through code in the browser is very cool, but it can already be done with a bit of work by enabling developer mode on your browser and writing your own .html and .js files.

What you can’t do is go back in time.

Which leads me to Tailspin. It is a fully reversible, standards-compliant1, meta-circular Javascript interpreter. As well as running in the browser and allowing algorithms to be visualised, it can run code both forwards and backwards.

A reversible interpreter provides some really interesting opportunities for exploration and education. So far I have focused on algorithm visualisation where reversibility makes it possible to scrub through the execution of algorithms. This is not just fun, it transforms the experience of understanding the algorithm. You can see this used to great effect in the Algorithm Wiki and in the depth-first traversal example below. The code that is highlighted on the left-hand side is the actual code that is running.

All the visualisations on the Algorithm Wiki have been updated and support reversible execution. You can now scrub through algorithms such as Factorial, Insertion Sort or Fisher-Yates Shuffle.

I have also updated the in-browser IDE to support reversibility, so you can step backward through your own code. Even after your code has hit an exception or ended, you can step backwards into the code to see what happened.

  1. Tailspin meets more than 99% of the 11500 tests in the ECMAScript Language test262 suite. The test262 suite is the standard test suite for ES 5.1 the standardised Javascript that runs in your browser. So you can be very certain that code that runs in Tailspin works in your browser. ↩